Dawn
by easytodancewith
Summary: Post-"Twilight." Kate wakes up to find her old life completely out of her reach.


**A/N: **My take on the whole "Maura Isles is Kate Todd in Witness Protection" thing. The whole premise of this is wildly improbable. It's best to ignore that. Spoilers for the last two episodes of "NCIS" season 2.

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><p>Kate wakes up in the hospital with an armed guard sitting by her bedside. He's lounging in one of those stiff, uncomfortable hospital chairs, reading a newspaper with a headline on the front page about the 2008 presidential primaries.<p>

As far as she knows, it's 2005.

**xXx **

The guy nearly shits his pants when he sees her looking at him. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish for a few moments before having the presence of mind to reach out and press the nurse call button at the side of her bed. More people rush in and boggle at her, and she tries to speak but her throat feels like sandpaper.

"Caitlin?" A man in a white coat says her name, and as she observes him, she notices that in addition to the typical beeper and stethoscope she would expect him to be wearing, he has a federal identification badge clipped to his belt.

What the hell is going on?

"Can you hear me?" The doctor persists. "Blink twice for yes."

She blinks twice.

"Do you know who you are?"

She blinks twice again, wishing she could speak. All she really wants to know at this point is what happened, because there's a huge gap in her memory. The last thing she remembers, Tony had a narrow brush with death courtesy of the pneumonic plague and she'd been starting to think that if it wasn't for his misogyny and sickening overconfidence in his own good looks, he wouldn't be so bad after all.

Someone gets her some water. She coughs, and her neck hurts like it does when she's been sitting at her desk at NCIS for too long. The doctor touches various parts of her body, asks if she can feel that, and she can. By the end, she's nodding because blinking is starting to make her dizzy, and the other people in the room are looking at her in this mixture of awe and disbelief.

"Gibbs?" she grinds out, and her voice doesn't sound like her own. "My team?"

The U.S. Marshals arrive to brief her.

**xXx**

It turns out that Ari Haswari shot her in the head, the bastard, but the members of her team are fine. The only thing is, as far as they know, _she_isn't.

She's confused for a second before it all starts to make sense. The badge she saw clipped to the doctor's belt, the armed guard, the Marshals.

"I'm going into Witness Protection, aren't I," she says, and it's a statement, not a question.

**xXx**

Kate has to face a hell of a lot of physio before she goes anywhere, but she's always liked a challenge - not that that makes it any easier to struggle with exercises she's used to being able to complete in a snap.

However demoralizing it can be, physiotherapy helps keep her mind off things. Never taking the elevator down to see Ducky again, no more chats in Abby's lab, never hearing Tony call McGee "probie," not getting to say goodbye to Gibbs. It's been three years now, for them. She bets they don't even think of her that often anymore, that Tony's probably too busy drooling over her replacement to remember her at all.

One of the marshals - David - comes to visit her periodically. She's pretty sure people in his profession aren't supposed to get too close to their charges, but he's a friendly face to talk to and God knows the number of those she has left isn't exactly a large one. He tells her about his family, shows her pictures of his little baby girl who's turning two next week, and it's strange for Kate to think about how a child was born and did all that growing while she was lying in a hospital bed, unconscious.

She presses him sometimes for clues to her new identity, but he either doesn't know or won't tell. It's weirdly important to her to know at least a name, and David promises to let her know when he can.

A couple of weeks later, he walks into her room and says "Maura." When she looks up reflexively at his voice, he smiles his lopsided grin. "It suits you just fine."

**xXx**

It's a little-known fact that Kate has a medical degree. It had always been a sore point between her and her parents that she eschewed a nice, quiet life of family practice or lab research to join the Secret Service and later NCIS, but, hey - her life, her choices. She got all her student loans paid off, at least, so guarding the president did have its perks.

As anything in law enforcement was obviously out of the question, the U.S. Marshal decided to give her the next best thing - working under the medical examiner for the Boston Police Department. She suspects David had a lot of influence over the decision, and she's grateful for it. The M.E. is up for retirement pretty soon and according to David, there are no strong candidates for the position, so if she plays her cards right, there's opportunity for advancement.

She thinks it's kind of crazy that she could go from not touching a scalpel in years to heading up the M.E.'s department for the biggest city in New England, but she guesses everyone has faith in her, which would be reassuring if she had the same kind of belief in herself.

David brings her a copy of "Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body" on his next visit and she rolls her eyes so hard it hurts.

**xXx**

It's strange to set foot on a plane without Gibbs or Tony or the others, but David's a good substitute. He squeezes her hand as they taxi down the runway, and when she looks down, he slides a "Fun Things to Do in Boston" guidebook into her lap.

Kate's been to Boston a couple of times on business, but never long enough to really explore the city. It reminds her a little of Georgetown in D.C., all brownstones and brick sidewalks and independently owned coffee houses that make the metropolis feel more like it's in the suburbs.

She and David pass through the financial district on their way from the airport, and there's a cruise ship docked at the harbor that offers an indicator of Boston's status as one of the biggest ports on the Eastern Seaboard, but the general ambiance is one of slow-paced sleepiness. She thinks she could grow to get used to this after years of flying around on Air Force One with the president and investigating suspicious naval deaths - which is a good thing, because it's not like she has a choice.

David drops her off in front of her new place with a package containing the keys to her new identity - a passport and driver's license, the address to her new job and, on a scrap of paper he presses into her hand, two phone numbers where she can reach him. Both of them kind of want to cry and neither do so, but David lets her hug him for a second or two longer than is socially acceptable because it's _ridiculously_hard to say goodbye to the one person she has left to confide in, and she thinks he gets that.

She tells him to kiss his daughter for her and he promises, giving her a little wave as he peels off in the Mercedes with the blacked-out windows that the U.S. Marshal had provided to transport her from the airport - which was _real subtle_, guys, jeez.

The house came ready-furnished with bare necessities to tide her over until she can make the place her own, and when she digs in the kitchen cabinets for a while, she finds a coffee maker and brews a pot. Her mind flashes on Gibbs for a moment, the memory so sharp she can barely breathe, but she knows if she's going to get through this, she has to be strong about it. She takes a calming sip of coffee and wonders how soon she can get someone out here to paint over the yellow walls.

**xXx**

Her first week at the M.E.'s office is a busy one. She recalls more from her medical school days than she expected to, and her colleagues' confidence in her - bolstered by the pretty fantastic résumé that David put together - makes her feel more at ease.

After fixing the yellow walls at her place, she's working on acquiring enough artwork to make up for the fact that she has no photos of family and friends to display. She finds some cool stuff on eBay, which is what she's browsing the day she first makes the acquaintance of the BPD's only female homicide detective.

"I see they're workin' you hard down here," comes the voice, droll and biting, and that's the first time they meet. Kate whips around, looking somewhat guilty, and the woman looks her up and down appraisingly before holding out her hand.

"Jane Rizzoli," she says brusquely.

Kate grasps it. "Maura Isles."


End file.
